On 2/17/07, Gerard Meijssen <gerard.meijssen(a)gmail.com> wrote: Who is working on this? Is any of the process public? Anthony

Hoi, You assume that a central server will exist.. Maybe, but maybe not. Leave that to the guys that implement it. Thanks, GerardM On 2/18/07, Andy Spencer <andy753421(a)gmail.com> wrote:

On 2/18/07, Anthony <wikitech(a)inbox.org> wrote: In an exchange with Gregory Maxwell it came up that I haven't actually asked for permission to do this. So just to be sure I'm posting this request here: I'd like to run a live mirror of Wikipedia without any advertising. I'd put the live pages into the robots.txt file so search engines would only be allowed to access my local cache, and thus wouldn't cause any extra traffic for Wikimedia. So can I have permission to do this? Anthony

Hoi, A live mirror is not based on using dumps. A life mirror wants an update by either crawling real time or by using the RSS feed to keep the system up to date. Thanks, GerardM On 2/18/07, Platonides <Platonides(a)gmail.com> wrote:

Andy Spencer wrote: It would use less bandwidth, yes, but it would take much longer to serve a page. Timwi

Gerard Meijssen wrote: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Reducing_transit_requirements -- Tim Starling

Hoi, Have you been paying attention lately; our costs and our traffic are growing exponentially. We do not have a rosy balance sheet as it is. Users will be extremely unhappy when we are not able to continue to provide our service. They are used to our service not being the fastest around. Why would a node that is close by be dead ?? NB when our customers find the argument "it's cheaper for us" not a good one, they have to realise that they are not paying customers. TANSTAAFL Thanks, GerardM Timwi schreef:

Hoi, A research project is a research project because it helps to learn something new. I support the VU project because it may bring us an alternate way of providing information in a reliable way. Your argument is that there is no example yet. My argument is that this research may prove how to do exactly what has never been done before. When you read the VU paper, you will find that security is addressed. You will also find how the distribution of content is modelled. I know that the VU will use a GRID to do the simulation of traffic. These guys have the tools to do a decent job !! When you state that we do not need to use cheaper hardware, it does not mean at all say that we have a healthy balance sheet. Our auditors indicate that we should have a reserve of a specific size; we do not have it. We expect that our growth will continue unabated; our efforts to get more money will have to be in line with these expectations. No, your assessment that our income is satisfactory is wrong. There are other costs other than hardware. I think we are asking too much from people like Anthere and the other board members; remember they are volunteers and I would not be surprised if it is like a full time job for them. Thanks, GerardM Simetrical schreef:

I'm kind of assuming that at some point there will be YouTube-style videos embedded in many pages - e.g. for [[Hummingbird]], there might be a video which when you click play, will show you a hummingbird flying, and then again slowed down to show the mechanics of its hovering flight; And for [[Windsor Castle]] you might get a virtual tour of the highlights of the castle; for [[Vladimir Putin]] you might get a subtitled excerpt of a speech he's made; and so forth. That'd probably impact on someone's bandwidth bill in a big way, although it's in keeping with the "media" in "MediaWiki", and certainly in keeping with an encyclopedia for the 21st century. All the best, Nick.

On 2/18/07, Domas Mituzas <midom.lists(a)gmail.com> wrote: Of course not. But will they stop growing due to lack of funding, or due to the fact that the goals have been met and everyone in the world has access to the sum of all knowledge? What percentage of the world is served by Wikipedia today? What percentage of all knowledge is in the encyclopedia? Multiply by the reciprocals, and how much would the yearly costs be? I see from Alexa the reach is 5% of Internet users. 16.6% of the world is on the Internet. I'm going to guess Wikipedia covers 1% of what it should. That's a major lowball estimate, though. So 1/.05/.166/.01=12,048. Will Wikimedia ever be able to raise $12 billion a year? If not, then cutting costs is mandatory in order to reach the goals. My guess is no. $12 billion a year is way too much money to be passing through a non-governmental organization like Wikimedia. And from your own comments we're talking about a problem that's going to be very difficult to solve. I'm not saying that everyone who is doing anything related to Wikimedia needs to drop everything else and work on this. But some people need to be considering it. In other words, I think we do "benefit from the flamefests on this list every few months", though obviously not literally from those parts of the discussion which are simply flames. Anthony

On 2/19/07, Domas Mituzas <midom.lists(a)gmail.com> wrote: Actually, there are plenty of ways to refer people to images without leaking the article title. I'm not sure what the point would be, though. Which pages you're viewing is pretty obvious based on what images you're loading. For my part, I don't think the WMF *should* have any power over privacy policy. The end users should have that power. If they want to browse anonymously, there are plenty of tools out there to do that. If they just want to stop giving referer information, there are plenty of tools for that too. Reducing costs and improving user experience are fairly synonymous. If you can cut costs, then you can either spend the extra money improving user experience or you can have fewer or less obnoxious fundraising drives. Yup. Anthony

On 2/19/07, Domas Mituzas <midom.lists(a)gmail.com> wrote: Well, I think you're completely oversimplifying things and either missing or completely ignoring solutions to the problems you bring up. Your response is a strawman. But since you don't want to discuss it, I'll leave it at that. Anthony

On 19/02/07, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell(a)gmail.com> wrote: Kid of five views [[Teletubbies]]. Tinky winky, Dipsy, La-la, OH MY GOD, IT'S GOATSE! Rob Church

Anthony wrote: Or if you're desperate you can just download the archive/dump and search it for that image. ;) Boris

Gerard Meijssen wrote: Users will be somewhat unhappy if all of Wikipedia goes down and never comes back. Users will be *much more* unhappy if Wikipedia continues to operate but is extremely slow, unreliable, and often down. Because people tend to turn off their own computers whenever they want to. And because computers sometimes crash, or Internet connections go down. (Note that I didn't use the word "customer".) Timwi

2007/2/18, Jim Wilson <wilson.jim.r(a)gmail.com>om>: Yeah, just somewhat unhappy. It's a problem, but also a chance. The great thing about having this project copyleft as it is, is that if Wikipedia would go down, anyone can take the content and start it again. And I'm quite convinced that if it were now announced that Wikimedia might have to close down in three months, before those three months were over there would be quite a number of people and groups doing exactly that. And where we now have one big Wikipedia, we would then have a multitude of small ones. Which has both advantages and disadvantages. -- Andre Engels, andreengels(a)gmail.com ICQ: 6260644 -- Skype: a_engels

HTTP? -- Domas Mituzas -- http://dammit.lt/ -- [[user:midom]]

On 18/02/07, Domas Mituzas <midom.lists(a)gmail.com> wrote: Fucking *excellent* post, Domas. Rob Church

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Gerard Meijssen wrote: Research projects are great; if it goes somewhere eventually that's super, and if it doesn't that's fine too. :) Our own resources have to be invested in managing what we know works; we don't benefit from the flamefests on this list every few months when someone hears about SETI@home or BitTorrent and thinks it'd be easy to apply the principle to a wiki so why aren't we doing it we must be incompetent or wasting money OMG! ;) Good distributed hosting for large numbers of small, fast-changing objects like a wiki is not what we might call a "solved problem". If it's feasible at all, that's something we should leave to researchers better versed in the field for now. In the *forseeable* future, we expect the primary web site to continue to work much as it does now, with central servers and some limited distribution through centrally-administered proxy caching systems. We can be more aggressive on other parts of the system, though. Bulk downloads like data dumps could be done over BitTorrent, but they're not really a significant overall resource drain. Media files are half our bandwidth, so that is an area which we can see gains from. Once media storage has been rearranged for better versioning stability (as already specced out) it can be much more aggressively cached, perhaps through content distribution networks such as Coral in addition to more traditional centrally-administered proxy caches. - -- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com / brion @ wikimedia.org)

On 2/19/07, Lars Aronsson <lars(a)aronsson.se> wrote: WMF is unique in that its bandwidth requirements are astronomical compared to its income. There are plenty of high-bandwidth sites. And plenty of low-budget sites. But there's nothing that comes close to Wikipedia in the proportion of the two. So if the (probably not that critical) problem is "how to host a huge amount of highly-requested content on a shoestring budget", it's not surprising that no one has attempted to solve it before. Steve